Are Robots Really Destined to Take Over Restaurant Kitchens?

Behind the blonde wooden service counter of a Chipotle restaurant, humanoid robots created in the golden image of C3PO prepare customers’ chicken burritos and sofritas tacos. After tapping their orders on glowing touch-screen iPads right behind the entrance doors, patrons sit patiently as their requests are carried out by the robotic prep team. The technologic back-of-house staff performs the same mundane tasks from open to close: pressing the tortilla, laying it flat, pouring the protein, adding in the condiments, folding the burrito tightly, wrapping in tin foil for the customer to come pick up, repeat.

It’s true this all might sound like a far-flung science fiction movie, but it’s actually a near-present future. This past July, the BratWurst Bot, developed by the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, flawlessly took orders, cooked, and served over 200 meals for a salivating garden party crowd. "We had a few people at the party surprised that robotics can do something like this," Arne Roennau, the department manager of robotics at FZI, said. "People are not aware that technology has come this far."

Over the past decade, various companies have predicted and publicized restaurants utilizing robotic "employees." Silicon Valley’s Momentum Machines, a group of "foodies and engineers with decades of robotics and restaurant experience," specializes in a fully-automated restaurant system that cooks and prepares almost 400 burgers per hour. The MIT students behind the robotic Spyce Kitchen have created a system that focuses on mixing and serving ingredients for complex meals, including winter veggie mac and cheese or chicken-bacon sweet potato hash. Both are almost completely independent of human interaction.

Meanwhile, Robotic Kitchen, developed by Moley Robotics, utilizes two humanoid arms and tactile intelligence to replicate the recorded motions of a chef cooking a meal. And at Zume Pizza, a pizza delivery start-up based in Silicon Valley, human employees work alongside a pair of automated machines — "Marta," who doggedly spreads marinara sauce on pizza dough in two seconds, and "Bruno," who takes pies topped by his human counterparts and pops them in the oven.

As fast-food employees continue their Fight for $15, restaurant corporations have begun to look for, and invest in, technological replacements. But despite signs pointing toward the coming of that employee army, there’s still the question of how soon that futuristic world will actually happen.

According to Siddhartha Srinivasa, a professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, a restaurant’s service style typically dictates two different classes of robotics problems. The robots already simmering in labs tend to be "industrial-style... where you’re creating lots of food, like a McDonald’s — sort of standardized equipment," Srinivasa says.

Spyce Kitchen’s streamlined system is one example: It receives customers’ orders and subsequently drops ingredients into a tumbler. This mixes and cooks the final product, which is plopped into the customers’ bowl. Similarly, Momentum Machines's burger robot can slice, cook, wrap, and serve its customers’ orders at an average rate of one burger every 10 seconds. (As an added bonus, it can even grind different combinations of meat for burger patties on demand.)

The BratWurst Bot is on the more advanced "humanoid" side of the technological developments. Carrying out several commands while utilizing one arm and a set of tongs, the machine can receive orders, place new bratwursts on the grill, turn them accordingly, and serve them, all while placing new ones on the grill. Roennau of FZI explained that the system relies on two RGB cameras, as well as a segmentation algorithm with background subtraction. This allowed the robot to detect the German sausages on the grill and the plates, as well as detect coloring changes on the bratwurst to determine if they needed to be turned or had been cooked to perfection.

"Our BratWurst Bot was handling a lot, for one," Roennau said. "It always knew what the next step was."

Of course, the restaurants are not completely free of human assistance, as one issue as-yet-untackled by robots is the actual preparation of the ingredients themselves. This, according to Srinvasa, is the second class of kitchen service that robotics may have a more difficult time tackling.

The "randomness factor" of fruits and vegetables provides a large roadblock. These are "unstructured objects and unstructured environments," Srinvasa explained, meaning that cucumbers and apples are not uniformly shaped and subject to variability. The pressure and areas necessary for slicing a head of lettuce versus slicing a watermelon are very different, which can be a challenge for a single robot needing to prepare a summery watermelon salad. (This is not an issue for Momentum Machines, as its tomato-slicing and lettuce-chopping components are fed their respective vegetables and continuously perform their single task.)

That lack of robotic dexterity in many machines is one reason why we’re still at least a few years off from the robot revolution. Price is another factor. In 2015, Moley Robotics’ Robotic Kitchen chef was priced at approximately $75,000. But its inventors are hoping to scale this price down to $15,000 by 2017, and according to Vivek Wadhwa, a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and writer of technological trends, this isn’t an unfathomable goal.

"Everything becomes affordable as it spreads," Wadhwa said. "Now, robots run between $20,000 to 40,000, for industrial robots. So, [if] we look at it on an exponential curve, give it a decade, and we’ll be down to $2,000 to 3,000 in today’s terms."

Wadhwa cited the development of different Apple iPhones and the Tesla car models as two recent examples in the tech world that, while expensive initially, significantly dropped in price over time. This is not unlike the microwave oven, which ran upwards of $1,200 when it was first sold commercially in 1955, and currently can be purchased for less than $50.

"You don’t stare at your dishwasher in fascination — I want to get robots to that stage of reliability."

Despite having solid conviction that robots in the kitchen will become a reality, Wadhwa explained that the innovation for food automation technology is more likely to come from research and development outside the food industry — currently, it’s booming in the manufacturing and health sectors.

"What’ll happen is they’ll come in as novelty items," Wadhwa said, referring to the developments by companies like Momentum Machine and Spyce. "Production will be slow, then you’ll have tech advancing in other fields. The cost will just keep dropping, to the point that you’ve got these amazing robots designed for a different purpose now that are being used in the restaurants."

This is not to say that food company executives aren’t investing in automated food tech. Several other experts have noted that the growing Fight for $15 movement is fueling the interest in the automation R&D. Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants, Inc. (the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.), has expressed his own desire to invest in automated restaurants, and Ed Rensi, former CEO of McDonald’s USA, has noted that a robotic arm (upfront cost: $35,000) could effectively perform the same job as a fry cook while costing as much — if not less — than the employee’s annual minimum-wage salary. Meanwhile, chains like Starbucks, Taco Bell, and McDonald’s have exhibited at least some interest in automation by allowing customers to order meals via touch-screen panels versus ordering from a cashier. (The latter companies, however, have not publicly announced any investment or research into back-of-course automation.)

Although organizations like Momentum Machines are looking "to obviate [fast-food workers]," researchers like Srinivasan and Henrik Scharfe, the director of the Center for Computer-mediated Epistemology at Aalborg University, are exploring ways in which robots can work alongside their human overlords rather than simply replacing them. Although this is less likely to be seen in the fast-food industry, higher-end restaurants and even home cooks might see the day where robots can detect what ingredients the chef might need, or could help chop carrots while the chef attends to filleting a fish.

"Specialized chefs [can] work alongside robots to produce new and exciting flavor combinations while allowing for a much more personalized experience than what we see today," Scharfe said. "In scenarios like this, there will be plenty of jobs, and likely more interesting jobs compared to today."

When robots are first unleashed in the coming years in the fast-food industry, customers will likely flock in awe at the novelty of non-humans taking the jobs of, well, your familiar homo sapien companions. But in 20 years, it will just be a commonplace fact that C3PO and his less humanoid brethren are the ones making your lunchtime Chipotle burritos.

"I’d love to make robots unsexy," Srinivasa of Carnegie Mellon University said. "It’s weird to say this, but when something becomes unsexy, it means that it works so well that you don’t have to think about it. You don’t stare at your dishwasher as it washes your dishes in fascination, because you know it’s gonna work every time… I want to get robots to that stage of reliability."

Matthew Sedacca is a writer living in New York City. Johnny Acurso is a freelance illustrator and robot enthusiast based in Portland, Oregon.
Editor: Erin DeJesus

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